Collaboration Agreement between PLuTO and META-NET

The Network of Excellence “Technologies for the Multilingual European Information Society”, henceforth META-NET, and the ICT Policy Support project “Patent Language Translations Online”, henceforth PLuTO, both established within Framework Programme 7, recognise the complementarity of their objectives and declare their intent for multi-level collaboration.

Scope and Objectives of the Participants

The PLuTOproject is developing advanced patent translation technologies adapted specifically to the needs of patent users (intellectual property (IP) specialists, attorneys, inventors) that will significantly reduce costs and save time in dealing with patent information across languages. The project’s vision is guided by the European Commission’s commitment to language diversification which, at its core, accounts for the provision of multilingual access to IP information, namely patents. By doing this, PLuTO aims to address the prohibitive costs faced by individuals and small businesses during the patent application process – of which up to 60% are translations costs – by providing more cost-effective options through cutting-edge automated translation technologies. PLuTO provides comprehensive translation solutions for patent users through the integration of state-of-the-art machine translation and multi-layered, multi-domain translation memory technology. The development of these technologies is guided by use-case holistic evaluations and well as close co-operation with patent users and user groups, who provide invaluable input and feedback.

META-NET is a Network of Excellence dedicated to the technological foundations of the European multilingual information society. Its main goals are: to build a strategic alliance META, consisting of national and international research programmes, corporate users and commercial technology providers and language communities; to strengthen the European research community through research networking and by creating new schemes and structures for sharing resources, that is the META-SHARE infrastructure; and to build bridges by approaching open problems in collaboration with other research fields such as machine learning, social computing, cognitive systems, knowledge technologies and multimedia content. META-NET will lead to a strong language technology community with ties to other R&D communities, with a network into industry and public administration, and with visions and plans for a strategic research agenda, to support the sustainability of the European, multilingual information society.

Areas of collaboration

PLuTO aims to develop and advance the state-of-the-art in machine translation and translation memory technologies to aid the free flow of IP information. This is in line with META’s aim of facilitating a more inclusive multilingual information society in Europe through engagement with commercial providers.

These shared goals form the basis of a solid relation between the two projects, and based on them we envisage collaboration in a number of areas of overlapping interest: